Implementing a Playable papal_faction

[bitterhowl]

Yes, I checked descr_character - all wages are 0.

Bellum has other strange things - such as avoiding AI to hire agents and ships.

[makanyane]

PKH is attempting to use the pope mechanic for the King of England, England isn't intended to be a playable faction but I need to make the succession look logical if the first pope (Edward I) gets killed. We did have it so that whoever the pope was got called King Edward, but that's a bit unrealistic if a lot of them get bumped off.

So am now thinking that England obviously doesn't have a family tree, but appropriate, could be King candidates exist/get spawned as both generals at large on the map, and as duplicate 'cardinals' stuffed somewhere out of sight and immobile. If the general character is killed I need to kill the agent version too, and not let any other random priests into the college. Does that make sense?

[Callistonian]

How exactly did you set it up so that whomever the pope was took the name "King Edward"? The only ways we discussed in this thread are 1) only having that one name in england's male name list, 2) using an epithet as Jadli suggested, 3) spawning a new pope using spawn_army.

I'm not sure it's feasible to force some sort of succession (even the appearance of it) into the College of Cardinals mechanic. You would have to confirm that higher levels of piety (or possibly something else) make cardinals more likely to be elected pope, but I don't think this is the case. I believe the new pope is elected from the college using a weighted vote of the catholic factions (assuming there are more than one cardinals in the college). Even if there is a way to rank cardinals in the college, they would all need to have unique names to match the generals - you're talking about potentially a lot of characters to keep track of in script.

[Jadli]

Pretty sure she means this (in expanded.txt)

Yes, I was right, removing the %S makes the pope not display his name, but only the title, so perfect for you . Logically, it works the same way for all the factions leaders titles and so on, in case one would want do something like that for the leaders....

Anyway, mak, I suppose you could call him simply King of England, would probably be better.


You could definitely do what you suggest, but only for starting generals (give them labels, and one general's label doesnt exist, kill the cardinal), dont see how would you do that for new characters possibly only somehow using the EOP (so you could assign labels to new characters and then also kill them).

Not sure if that makes some kind of family tree work, but I suppose it could, if you are smart about... Based on what do you want them to become a king?

You can of course limit lower cardinals piety, to make sure only characters (and hence their priests doubles) you want, have enough piety to become a cardinal. But how would you affect whom they elect Im not sure.... unless you were england player (I assume they all come from England)?

[makanyane]

Yeah, I meant the %S thing.

'King of England' is possibly a solution to the infinitely regenerating Edward issue.

I have an additional problem:
To hide the cardinal promotion issue from the player I wanted to keep the cardinals to only being England faction, and not allow England to be playable, which means the playable Catholics get the Standing with the Pope/crusade stuff but don't participate in voting.

That worked if no other factions could create priests, but for other reasons (amalgamating with Albion and wanting to use some of their priest as sheriff type mechanic and strat models...) I've tried with other factions able to build priests and if there are empty slots they're getting in as cardinals even if they don't have the required piety level from descr_campaign_db.xml - I'm wondering if I'm missing some other sort of switch as we're based off Britannia with the religion=culture thing, but I thought that was just a text {piety} Influence type conversion?

EDIT: apparently I'd entirely broken my campaign_db.xml with some earlier unrelated experiment - must remember to check log file for errors more often!

[Gigantus]

Brain fart - have you thought of 'cloning' the catholic religion? Like creating a religion and calling it 'dummy' and then do all the display stuff to look like it's catholic. No crusades, no electorate, nada.
Then do a simple respawn of a named character for england as I suggested earlier to keep the pope 'alive' (absolutely no cardinals\priests needed). In combination with the 'expanded' naming approach your problem should be solved. Leaves you with the issue of two different religions with the same name, though.

[makanyane]

I did think of going for hidden region to spawn priests for the college into, then realised using priests still gives me the naming problem.

Setting the cardinal level >10 so no-one gets in, spawning replacement faction leader by spawning named_characters with an army seems to work well and keep the name. That doesn't work with the spawnpool_faction unique names idea though as the transfer of the character in, doesn't trigger the becomes faction leader effect. But if I'm doing a deliberate spawn I can label the character to control him if necessary later.

I did start trying to write the results/possibilities up on the wiki here:
https://wiki.twcenter.net/index.php?...modding_(M2TW)

everyone's welcome to help complete or correct that!

[Callistonian]

I did start trying to write the results/possibilities up on the wiki here:
https://wiki.twcenter.net/index.php?...modding_(M2TW)

Excellent work. Could you expand on this point a bit?

Spawning a priest via spawn_army, which does allow those variables, is limited by the priest being killed when the game is reloaded, this causes a crash if the priest is adopted into the college and the player quits and reloads on the turn that the vote should be resolved.

So the scenario here is that we use spawn_army for a priest, he gets inducted into the College, but he's still on the map. The user reloads the map and thereby kills the priest. Since the priest is in the College, this results in a CTD. This must be something peculiar with the spawn_army hybrid-priest. Surely cardinals are allowed to die normally without a CTD or it would have been a serious bug in the vanilla game.

[makanyane]

Good point - I also suppose you don't often quit out before resolving the vote - it could be tested with a sequence of kill-pope, kill-cardinal that's been there from descr_strat, at the right points.

The other possibility is that having the priest disappear through lack of bodyguard could be inherently buggier than if the game has properly decided character'x' died of natural causes, etc.

[Jadli]

what about epithets though... does it stay same when a character becomes a pope? You could use to kinda keep showng his true name? (for starting characters?) And I assume when we use the method when pope's/king's name is not displayed ( so he is called just "King", etc) I suppose his epitthet would surely not be displayed as well?

If not, well, mak I suppose you should at least give some unique ancillaries for characters that are likely to become king, so you can at least via ancillaries check who it is

[makanyane]

I think I'm going for the bit I said a few posts up "spawning replacement faction leader by spawning named_characters with an army seems to work well and keep the name"

So plan is:
Set the required level for Cardinals >10 so no-one ever gets into the college.

Everything is fine with that if the King/Pope dies, England(my papal_faction) just continues with-out a faction leader/Pope.

Spawning an English army with named_character whilst those positions are open, results in that named_character becoming Faction Leader and Pope. As he's a leader and not an agent he can get spawned with custom portrait and label and traits/ancs etc. He also keeps his first name so Edmund Lancaster becomes King Edmund

If he's pretending to be someone already on map (who started on map and has a label) the doppleganger Edmund can get bumped off at the same time.

Testing whether there is a live Pope or not can be done via them always ending up with a unique ancillary and checking for that. If he's died the scripted spawn can vary by date/conditions, e.g. is Edmund alive, has EdII 'come of age' yet. As family tree doesn't work for papal_faction EdII would need to be spawned anyway, so can have label.



I think that works - you don't get the nicety of the cardinals voting, but it keeps everything else and priests can get used for other stuff without worrying about them getting elected.

[Steward Denethor II]

Interesting thread. I think TATW just made the 'Pope' unplayable because of the Ring script. Also they were not short on faction slots so they decided to play it safe, I guess.

[FootSoldier]

I'd like to ask about the mechanic in vanilla M2TW where the Pope becomes a "tame" Pope and goes neutral to the player faction after a period of war and being repeatedly killed each turn.

I know this is a thread about using the Pope for modding purposes as an "eternal" but non-playable and non-playing? faction, as the spirit of Sauron or whoever. I have understood from the thread that the Papacy/Pope cannot be destroyed.

Two factions, the HRE and Byzantines, have Rome in their victory conditions. Usually this means taking Rome from the Papal States, though another faction may have taken it (Milan, or the HRE do this sometimes when I'm playing the Byzantines). It's best to catch the Pope in Rome and kill him there by siege or battle. Then he respawns in the Rome region. The player then needs to kill him each turn for a varying number of turns. I've read elsewhere that the College of Cardinals has to be exhausted before this happens, and that seems to take 20 or more turns sometimes so maybe the College refills until all 5+ priests are dead.

During these turns killing the Pope on turn start as he appears doesn't allow him to call crusades, hire mercenaries, or run away. Sometimes he's in ambush position in forest, so the player needs to be careful to find him and a couple of spies are useful.

I have done this routine many times with the Byz and HRE in particular, but also with Milan and Sicily. Relations between the player faction and the Papal States remain at war and if ex-communicated the player remains ex-communicated.

At some point in this procedure of killing the Pope every turn when the Pope respawns the Papal States have turned Neutral. For the remainder of the game the Pope stands in the Roman countryside with no troops, agents, or apparent diplomacy. No diplomats visit him. He does not call crusades. The Papal States relationship to the player changes to Neutral and iirc the player can even ally with Papal States, which offer is deemed Very Generous.

Otherwise the Papal States as playable is a reasonably interesting Italian faction, especially if the Halberd/Pike fix is applied and the Papal Guard made recruitable from Huge City walls. The player doesn't have a relationship status with the Papal States on the Papal screen, can call crusades, though they are sometimes just announced. At the start of the game a crusade can't be called by the Papal States player, and maybe at other times during the campaign. The player doesn't get warned about attacking other Catholic factions iirc. Liberating.

I hope this doesn't digress too much from the point of thread. If so, sorry.



Edit: iirc also there are no papal elections once the Pope has become tame. I've never checked to see if the name changes, so can't be sure there isn't a mechanic for this. ... Maybe I should do some testing.

[Callistonian]

I think what you're describing is indeed the papal election mechanic at work. The papal_faction with "no" family tree, can never be killed unless the kill_faction command is used, and I'm sure there are no instances of that in the vanilla campaign script. I'm also fairly certain there are no spawn_army commands being used to create new popes and that there is no hard coded mechanic for spawning new popes (I've gone dozens of turns playing as a papal_faction with absolutely no assets on the map and no new popes ever spawn since the college is empty). By process of elimination, that leaves the College of Cardinals as the only possible source for these popes that are being spawned in.

I wonder what makes the elected pope spawn into the same region even when it's controlled by a different faction. That could be due to the 'rebel-to' faction in descr_regions, although there are a couple other regions in vanilla with papal_states given for that. Or it could be using the faction_creator in descr_strat, for which only the Roman_Province has the papal_states as creator.

As for the pope eventually becoming neutral to the player faction, are you sure that doesn't have anything to do with the pope being from the player faction or allied faction? I think the papal_states' diplomatic standings (see triggers) are based on who the current pope is.

[Gigantus]

I am guessing that it might be like the Marian reform mechanics in RTW where you need a province with a specific name (Latin_province?) for it to work. Guess simply changing the name of the Rome province would clarify that. Otherwise he will spawn as long as there are cardinals.

[Callistonian]

@Gigantus - The Marian Reforms region uses the "italy" HR, nothing special about the region name.

[Gigantus]

Ah, thanks for correcting me. It's been a while I had looked into the reform.

[Jadli]

Maybe finally change the name of the thread to "Why NOT avoid using papal_states?

Think the thread proved that the ps can be used in many and many interesting ways

[Callistonian]

I changed the thread title and OP. I tried to include all of the major discoveries and implementations. Please let me know if I forget anything.

[Jadli]

Finally getting around of probably implementing the papacy in mod

Everything is fine with that if the King/Pope dies, England(my papal_faction) just continues with-out a faction leader/Pope.

Spawning an English army with named_character whilst those positions are open, results in that named_character becoming Faction Leader and Pope. As he's a leader and not an agent he can get spawned with custom portrait and label and traits/ancs etc. He also keeps his first name so Edmund Lancaster becomes King Edmund

If he's pretending to be someone already on map (who started on map and has a label) the doppleganger Edmund can get bumped off at the same time.

Testing whether there is a live Pope or not can be done via them always ending up with a unique ancillary and checking for that. If he's died the scripted spawn can vary by date/conditions, e.g. is Edmund alive, has EdII 'come of age' yet. As family tree doesn't work for papal_faction EdII would need to be spawned anyway, so can have label.



I think that works - you don't get the nicety of the cardinals voting, but it keeps everything else and priests can get used for other stuff without worrying about them getting elected.

Spawn army seems to be the way... though, are you spawning a regular named character, or literally a leader? (when you write "leader" after the male). And if not the latter, have you tried it though? As from my understanding spawning a leader means the game will try to make him a leader (primarily, not secondarily as with the named character), so perhaps that would be possible to usein more cases than just this one...

I wonder, whats the papal faction doing when it doesnt have a "pope"? Can crusades, missiosn, excommunications and so on still happen normally, or is it all "on halt"?

Also, I figured, have you guys tried to use freeze_faction_ai for the papal faction to perhaps be able to control some of its aspects as well? as the command does indeed freeze a lot of things (including stuff like traits, age and so on). Perhaps freezing the faction the moment a pope dies (before the voting) and using spawn_army to give it a new leader and then unfreezing, would work even with the cardinals? (as the faction would get a new leader before it "realized" the pope is dead, as it was frozen). Hence we could keep the cardinals (eventhough they wouldnt do much...)

(and if you have some new exp with papacy from your mod mak, please share )

Also, shouldnt this be moved to the tutorial section?

EDIT

What about off map popes, how does that work?